Forward deployed engineering
Engineers who ship inside your company.
FWDEVS places forward deployed engineers with your team. They learn how your people work and build the system with them. They stay until it runs in production.
01 / The role
What is a forward deployed engineer?
- forward deployed engineer
- noun · FDE, also FDSE
- A customer-facing software engineer who helps implement a product inside a client company, working alongside the client's employees for a defined period of time.
An FDE doesn't hand over a product and a manual. They sit with your team, work out where the product fits in your workflows, and build the integration themselves.
Most of the job is backend and AI systems work, plus a lot of listening. The same person who writes the code also runs the workshop and explains the tradeoffs to whoever signs off. When they leave, your team keeps the docs they wrote.
FWDEVS is built around that way of working. We place FDEs with companies that need one.
02 / Process
How an engagement works
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01
Discovery
We sit with the people doing the work and find the pain points worth fixing, along with the data that feeds them. A vague ask becomes a written scope.
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02
Architecture
We design the system end to end and decide what to build and what to integrate. You see what it will cost to run before anything is built.
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03
Build and integrate
We connect to your APIs and enterprise tools and ship a prototype early, so your team reacts to something real. Then we take it to production.
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04
Rollout and handoff
We run the rollout and monitor it in the field while your team learns to own it. The code and docs stay with you.
03 / Contact
Need an FDE?
Tell us what you want to ship and where it's stuck. We reply by email.